3 Ways Human Capital Management Suites Help Run Remote Teams

It should come as no surprise that the number of people who are doing at least some parts of their work remotely is rising. Remote working seems to make sense for both the employer and employee – the former can use it to reduce overheads, improve productivity, and access foreign talent, while the latter benefits from greater flexibility and more opportunities. So, today you can manage a team of highly skilled workers working on the same project – from different continents.

The rise of remote teams, especially teams distributed across different countries, brought forth a number of difficulties for those whose job it is to manage the teams. For the vast majority of these problems, human capital management suites offer a remedy.

What Are Human Capital Management Suites?

Human capital management suites, or HCM suites, are collections of integrated software solutions that are used by HCM professionals to make some parts of their jobs easier. And if you look at all of the things that fall under human capital management, you’ll understand why they need this software – everything from recruitment, onboarding, and scheduling to payroll processing, performance analysis, and education is a part of human capital management.

HCM suites usually offer solutions for several, if not all of these tasks. Blytheco’s Ascentis HCM, for example, includes HR and talent management systems, as well as payroll, self-service, recruitment, timekeeping, and benchmarking software solutions. While the multitude of their functionalities makes human capital management suites an asset in the traditional workplace, for distributed workplaces they are almost a requirement.

They Work When You Don’t

Having one team member in Asia, another one in Europe, and a third in North America means that at any given time of the day, chances are that someone from the team will be working. But a single team manager can’t be working 24/7, nor can the people whose job it is to provide support and administrative services to the team.

Human capital management suites are, by large, available as cloud-based SaaS solutions. They can be available to team members anytime, anywhere. Most importantly, HCM suites allow automation of some of the functions that are otherwise dependent on humans.

For examples, a team member who wants to ask for a day off work can use the system, without having to talk to you directly. The same team member could also access their own performance reviews, contracts, and work history without having to ask someone from HR for them.

They Help You Track the Team

It’s one thing to manage a team that works in the same office space. Managing a remote team is a completely different beast. You can’t actually see what your team is doing or how much time they’re spending on working, so you have to rely on other tools to stay on top of everything.

A human capital management suite comes with different solutions that help you track the team members. It can log how many hours your team members have spent working, and monitor their activity levels during that time. At the end, you’re left with a timesheet that shows you who spent how much time doing what. Some human capital management suites will even generate reports.

They Help You Make Decisions

What gets measured gets managed, and the ability of human capital management suites to measure helps you make better decisions about your team. You can see which team members are underperforming and would use additional education. You can also see the members who are pulling their weight with ease and give them bonuses or more responsibilities.

Another way human capital management suites could improve your decision-making is by providing you with valuable information about your industry. If you’re not sure how much you should be paying a team member from another country, for example, you can use the HCR suite to find out the average salary people who work in the same position in that country are paid. You could also find out how the raise your team got compares to the average in the team members’ regions, and bring it up a notch if you don’t want your team members to leave you for the competition.

Takeaway

Remote working is steadily becoming the new way of working. But for all the good it does for businesses and employees, it also creates issues which are prominent if the remote workers live in different countries. By using human capital management suites, team managers can leverage the availability, and tracking and processing abilities of HCM suites to efficiently manage distributed teams.

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